Byways
by Mebd
Summary: Composition of eight playlets through the years from Arthur and Guinevere's marriage to the final scene Translated from French .


****Improvisation upon the Arthurian legends and mostly the Arthur/Morgana couple.

The picture of Guinevere doesn't match the one from the series.

Translation from the French version of the poem : _Chemins de traverse_.

* * *

**Byways**

1. She dances when walking

She sways and staggers

She dances

Balancing on the razor's edge and at each side a chasm

Her hands fly with the arabesques

Of the wind of the falls she ducks as she bends

She dances

On the brink of collapse

At every step forward

Her foot flies brushes woos the space the air the unknown

She strides along the crests the ridges

Hesitantly she gropes her way she moves forward blinded

And she dances

She bends and bows and whirls and twirls and trembles and almost

Falls fragile the slightest breath

And she topples over

And she is shattered

A thousand brittle pieces a thousand volatile fragments

Unsteadily balancing on the crest

On the razor's edge

Her byways

Her impassable routes

On semitones half-measures perhaps almost borders thresholds

She speaks in the subjunctive

She lives like she dreams.

* * *

2. He comes back victorious he triumphs

Under the cries the joy the crowd's noise

Under the bathing sun

He triumphs

He's got it all

Sunshine on his thin hair on his lips he offers to life

To glory to love

He's got it all

He comes back victoriously

He goes to the country to his family to his sister who's waiting for him

He comes home he brings back treasures

Conquests honors and his ecstatic retinue

His young wife

His beautiful fair-haired wife

With her soft chubby body her curved hips her fertile belly her huge dowry

He triumphs under the high noon sun

Triumphs for his sister's sake for his own for his retainers'

For his sister

Whose image dances against his retina whose perfume drifts at the tip of his nose

He can already see her tightrope walker figure her flying hands

Her dark eyes

So he takes the soft warm hand

He takes the sun on his forehead

The sun the triumph inside of him

And hold them out haphazardly to his sister's shadow

He offers her heedlessness and ease

white skies and impatience and electricity

He dedicates courage and gold energy blood to her

He's got it all he gives it all

And he laughs and laughs and laughs

He's on fire he crackles

He is taut

A ray of sunlight

Triumphs.

* * *

3. He comes she rushes up

She races against the chains of the fabric the ground her body

He reaches out to her

with his opened hand

His tanned skin his smile in the zenith light

A few more feet and her sharp features

The bony planes of her face the bridge of her nose her chin her dark eyes

The angles of her slender body

He is crowned with sunshine glowing from under his skin

The rays of light hang upon his eyelashes and skitter over his teeth

A few steps and the curves of her lips of her cheeks

Of her dimples of kiss buds.

And light spread over her face like a reflection

A second hanging in the air

Freeze frame

No more foreign bodies no more crackling

No more muzak no more walk-on actors

A second the whole lot the intense absolute

And the sounds explode his other hand is taken her smile freezes the shock sinks in

Time-lapse photography of her turning away from

Pain shots lack of understanding

Rejection failure

He drops the fingers both hands fall

Suddenly a fall's dusk

Suddenly the defeat

Suddenly the solitude

She's gone on a crest

Sheer on the very edge of skyline

But she hasn't fallen from the world

He discovers gravity and the chains of marriage

For the first time the fair hair the tall frame

She is tough

This woman he married

She is beautiful she is curvy she is fertile

He doesn't know who she is

He closes his eyes.

* * *

4. He is drowning

He dissolves he sinks deep down he bogs

His breath stuck in the mud

His thoughts coagulated

A peat bog of dissolved flesh and gestures

His words fail him just like his ears do

Just like his eyes fixed beyond the walls do

He doesn't try and stop his sinking inside his body he looks away

Into the ghosts of passed moments

Of dreamed moments

He trusted the time he would have had

Trusted her presence from time immemorial

He let himself get carried away by her swoosh

He sinks

Diffuse outlines

Acedia

Blur

End

He bogs down and silts up

He is drowning he can't stay within his depth he's flat

And the staggered world under the muddy water prism

His muffled heart throbbing

His blood pulsing inside his heaping himself

Inside his missing parts

Dissolved

Sunk parts

Inside his wasting life

Inside his evaporating time

The mist of his escaping seconds

His own shadows are about to be forgotten

He contracts shrinks thins.

* * *

5. There is nothing she can do for him

She loves him she is helpless

She is fair-haired blue-eyed and her hands are rosy and chubby

Her fleshy loving curved lips can only mouth soft love words

There is nothing she can do

Sharp words and the cutting edge of pale lips would have helped

White hands and frail wrists and cold eyes and midnight hair would have helped

Tightrope walker figure

Acute and blurry gestures

And citric cool perfume would have helped

The biting wintry wind and thick night and frost and black ice would have helped

And she has none of them

She has nothing but her fleshy lips and her loving arms

Her curved hips

Her sterile belly

She has nothing but her presence the home she offers

Her heart to win that can give endlessly

That some gazes she doesn't notice lust for

He looks away beyond daylight

And there is nothing she can do what she gives stays untouched

She does nothing she lets go

She lets waste

She is loosing herself she denies words she defeats tries and attempts

She turns away and lets her tears fall

She gets to know other eyes on her

She sees the shadows of some hands and hearts upon her own

She turns her back and closes her eyes

She welcomes upon her the weight of devotion

Agog hands which honor and revere

And love, at last.

* * *

6. He knows

He refuses and swears and sinks and hates

He knows

He knows and madness falls upon him with its iron stranglehold

Hooks onto his bones

A salt and steel underwiring

Salt on his wounds

On his bared pride and his gaping regrets and his blood stained love

Steel in his gestures and choices

In the fury he unfurls in the crimes he calls for

He keeps silent he knows

He walks towards the shadows towards the hatred

He hates

He envies he's jealous and hurt

He backs away in the shade

Phantom spin in the corner of his eye wintry smile for a second

He backs up in himself

In a forgotten time in his omissions and his lacks and his absences

He curls up inside of his empty body

And his faulty acts and his dreamed acts

He would like and dreams and had had and hasn't and could and has dropped

He knows

And he hates and he is consumed with envy

Explodes with evil

With welcomed dementia

He ravages and he murders

His sharp metallic salted words

His weapon-pain

Poison for revenge

Justice for equality

For their achieved adultery their accomplished cheating

For his infidelity in his mind for his repressed perjury

For his constant treachery

The latent links

He cannot then no one may

Plunges into the easy way

Rage.

* * *

7. Fury is achieved

Pain swallowed

There still are the white sky and the approaching winter

There still are the passed years

The retrospective of his wasted time

The films of his happy youth

The residual warmth of high noon

The echoes of life

Over his body contorted

With regrets and fury and crimes

His eaten flesh

Corrosive pain

Weight of years

Of chains

Of too taut or too loosened links

Around his shaking hands

His hands still thrilling about his bared knuckles

His hands when he holds a lover

His hands brushing against promises

And dreaming another skin

Wasted bodies deadline hiccups

Game over

He thought he was alone in the crowd

And in his solitude in the gathered playlets

And reconstituted seconds

She finally comes back to him.

* * *

8. She drew a map of the world on the razor's edge

She kissed the limits

Found the thresholds

Threw her own shadow on her given time

She split in two

Gave birth

Now she strides again along her byways her old shortcuts

Her peculiar moves forward

She back tracks

She marches towards the origin

Towards her starting point her vanishing point ad infinitum

She walks towards the end

The node of the circle the stop for evermore the eternal recurrence

Nothing has changed

Yet everything differs

She already knows

Obvious fact

He would be waiting for her somewhere

He would have felt her before even seeing her

He will stand

Intersection

Fulcrum

Pivot

He would be lightened from his intensity

Freed from his frenzied sheath

She would weight with her whole body

Complete

They hardly touch each other and go away off screen and disappear out of frame

She comes to him

Beyond the blank horizon

Where she can't See

And she sways.


End file.
